BANAL version 0.03 - or BANAL's Absolutely Not A Ledger

Matthew Rice - Matthew.Rice@ftlsol.com

FTL Solutions Inc.

August 1997

This file serves as the announcement that goes to the comp.os.linux.announce and comp.lang.perl.announce newsgroups as well as a message to the site maintainers at pgw.on.ca and sunsite.unc.edu.

NOTE: The ftp server at pgw.on.ca is getting a little flakey. If you are unable to connect, please try again or request it from the mailing list manager (see below). It is about 86kB uuencode.

What is BANAL?

BANAL is a bookkeeping system that allows you to track invoices, clients, projects and expenses (more stuff like bank accounts and TODOs will be added later). BANAL is a client/server application so you can keep one set of books one your system while allowing everyone access.

Although, I've written this for my own purposes as a consultant (because no one else would do it), I know that others could make use of this package.

What is new in this release?

How do I subscribe to the mailing list?

Simply send an e-mail to majordomo@pgw.on.ca with the body of the message (NOT the subject) saying: subscribe banal

You should receive confirmation shortly. Send your questions/comments to: banal@pgw.on.ca

How do I obtain the distribution through e-mail?

Simply send an e-mail to majordomo@pgw.on.ca with the body of the message (NOT the subject) saying: get banal latest

You should receive confirmation shortly. If you want a specific version then substitute the word latest with the version that you want. eg: get banal 0.03

Attention users of previous version!!

There are two items of particular interest. The first is that you no longer have to double delimit the shell's special characters (eg. '>').

The second, and more important item, is if you are using the stock file Invoice.ps file (PS prolog for the invoices). If this is your case then you should change the names of the address fields in the company database.

In the file Company.rdb, find the first line that does not begin with the character '#'. On that line, change the string 'Address1' to 'AddressA' and 'Address2' to 'AddressB'. The name changes were made to assist in making a LaTeX driver for documents.

What can it do?

For this release, BANAL can store your information, list (and allow searching of) information and generate invoices and income statements. You can also make and use recurring and memorized transactions to ease the burden of creating them manually. Check the TODO file, included with the distribution, for an idea of what is coming in the next release.

I'm hoping to get some feedback on what others would like before I get too caught up in my own specific situation.

How easy to use is it?

Currently, there is only a command line client (bk). The client takes a subcommand to invoke some action. There are only three types of subcommands: list, edit and print (print now includes statement and runbatch).

By type of subcommand, I mean that to edit an invoice you type:
bk invoice

While to edit an expense you type:
bk expense

Once you've learned a subcommand, you've learned all of the subcommands for that type.

How good is the documentation?

It should be adequate enough to get you started - the server running and you running some simple commands. Let me know if this is not the case and I'll clarify the text. The documentation is not for me (I know the system) so your feedback is essential.

Where to get it?

If you want to obtain BANAL and try it out, ftp to ftp://pgw.on.ca/pub/banal/ and look for a file banal-X.YY.tar.gz, with X.YY being a version number (0.00 is of course the first). Unpack it in a "sources" directory and start reading the document in the "doc" subdirectory.

I've also uploaded this version to sunsite.unc.edu in incoming. It should be moved to ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/financial/accounting.

What is the copyright?

FTL Solutions Inc. holds the copyright (I am doing it under their time), however, it is very unrestricted (read: do what you want but don't think of suing them). There is a more detailed COPYRIGHT file included with the distribution.

Who should I contact ?

Right now the only person (or group) to contact is:
Matthew.Rice@ftlsol.com

Alternatively, you may subscribe to the BANAL mailing list (see above) and ask questions there.